Myrlie Evers-Williams, wife of murdered civil rights leader Medgar Evers, will deliver the invocation at President Barack Obama's second inauguration on Monday.

Written by

Deborah Barfield Berry
Gannett Washington Bureau

Myrlie Evers-Williams will embody decades of civil rights struggles when she delivers the invocation at President Barack Obama's inauguration Monday.

Her presence on a national stage is especially relevant this year, the 50th anniversary of several civil rights milestones - the assassination of civil rights icon Medgar Evers, Evers-Williams' husband, the March on Washington that featured Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, and the 1963 church bombing in Birmingham, Ala., that killed four black girls.